Designing for the Circular Economy

What do you do with a toaster when you no longer want it? Until recently, no one thought about that question until the toaster was ready for the scrap heap. Today, advocates of the circular economy suggest that the best time to address end-of-life issues is when a product is first being designed. It’s at that point that it has the greatest potential for circularity. If the designers of your toaster had thought about it not as a disposable appliance but as a product with value worth preserving, your options would be considerably enhanced.

That, in fact, is what the designers at the London-based Agency of Design (AoD) did. As part of a project that “looked at the end of life of electrical products and designed alternative ways to make the most of the material that they embody,” the AoD design team took on the challenge of rethinking the humble toaster. They came up with three different approaches, each of which, says the company, “embodies a different strategy to designing circularity from the outset.”

Designing for Longevity

AoD began by attacking the planned obsolescence that has dominated product design for so long. Knowing that aluminum recycles “with no loss of its material properties” and that the material is likely to remain valuable to recyclers for the foreseeable future, the design team worked to make every part of the first toaster, known as the Optimist, out of aluminum, “starting off with 100% recycled content and knowing that it can be infinitely recycled into other products at the end of its life.”

To maximize the product’s longevity, AoD designers looked for a design “so simple that there was nothing to break.” The Optimist ended up with very few moving parts and with heating elements — the shortest-lived components in a toaster — that were simple to remove and replace.

The design team also considered the perceived value of the toaster to owners who would relish its longevity. The toaster was given a “rough surface texture, allowing it to grow old gracefully” and its birth date was cast into the aluminum so owners could enjoy celebrating its service year after year. The Optimist even included a simple toast counter so that, “When you hand the toaster down through the generations, your children will know you’ve enjoyed 55,613 rounds of toast!”

The greatest challenge to making such a long-lived product is coming up with a workable business plan. Ever since the term “planned obsolescence” was coined during the Great Depression, the U.S. and much of the world’s economies have relied on the disposal and replacement of products with defined lifespans. As author Giles Slade notes in Made to Break, planned obsolescence has become “a touchstone of the American consciousness.”

The lighting industry has been grappling with this question since the long-lived L.E.D. bulb was first introduced into the residential market in 2008. According to J.B. MacKinnon in his New Yorker article, “The L.E.D. Quandary: Why There’s No Such Thing as ‘Built to Last’,” the answers so far have been less than inspiring. Some companies are returning to planned obsolescence by creating ever-cheaper lightbulbs with ever-shorter lifespans, while others got out of the residential lighting business. In October of 2015, for example, MacKinnon notes that General Electric “broke up G.E. Lighting to leave behind a rump firm — the light-bulb division, essentially — that would be easy to sell off.”

While there are still some markets left for lighting with built-in obsolescence — most notably the automotive sector — the industry is actively pursuing other ways to make longevity pay. A shift is already underway, at Phillips for instance, from selling lights as a product to selling lighting as a service. It’s a growing trend, according to the recent Navigant Consulting “Third-Party Management of Lighting Systems in Commercial Buildings: Global Market Analysis and Forecasts” report.

Companies are also looking to build in smart technology that distinguishes their L.E.D. product from others and offers opportunities for continuing updates. In the commercial realm, G.E., for example, is developing streetlights that alert authorities whenever a built-in sensor detects gunshots in the area. As for the residential market, MacKinnon quotes Philip Smallwood, the director of L.E.D. and lighting research for Silicon Valley-based Strategies Unlimited: “Lighting is the perfect medium for you to insert the other connectivity products to fill the house, because you use light everywhere.”

Regulation may also help pave the way for business models based on long-lived products. Tim Cooper, a design professor at Nottingham Trent University and editor of the book Longer-Lasting Products, sees possible solutions in government regulations that penalize obsolescence or reward longevity. But as Cooper recognizes, regulations follow culture, and the throw-away culture has been notoriously slow to change.

Modular Design: Replacing Parts, not Products

Another way of extending product life is to use a modular approach that allows owners to replace parts without having to replace the entire unit. This was the second strategy AoD took to rethinking the toaster. The Pragmatist model was designed with modular toasting slots that could be joined together to make any sized toaster a customer wanted. The modular design also made it possible to unclip a faulty toasting slot so it could be exchanged without interrupting the owner’s ability to keep making toast. And AoD designed these modules to be “thin enough to fit through a letterbox, making the return process as easy as possible for the consumer.”

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation highlights another example of modular design where performance is far more critical. Noting that ambulances were being sold at auction after just a few years, DLL, a global provider of asset-based financial solutions, investigated and found that it was the high cost of maintaining chassis components, such as the engine and gearbox, that led owners to return the vehicles.

The most valuable part of the ambulance, the large box that housed all the medical equipment and carried the patient, was generally in fine condition. DLL reduced customer costs by 20% and doubled the useful life of the vehicles by designing a patient-care module that could be easily removed and remounted on a new chassis.

Design for Disassembly

Modular construction allows for disassembly by the individual, but is of little use to a company looking to extract value from products in volume. For their third toaster design, the AoD designers set out to create an inexpensive toaster that could be quickly and easily disassembled without degrading the component parts or mixing their materials. The solution was a toaster put together with snap-fit joints that contained small pellets. Placed in a vacuum chamber (“a cheap piece of capital equipment,” says AoD), the pellets expand, pop open all the joints, and leave a disassembled product.

The AoD strategy is similar to a concept known as Active Disassembly using Smart Materials (ADSM), pioneered by Joseph Chiodo of Active Disassembly Research. Using “memory materials,” which hold a shape until they reach a trigger temperature (either hotter or colder than normally encountered), Chiodo created screws and other kinds of connectors.

Once the product is heated or cooled to the trigger temperature, all of the screws lose their threads and the product falls apart without any damage to the component parts. Temperature is not the only means of triggering the change. As with the toaster, a change in pressure can work, or disassembly can be triggered by “microwave, infrared, sound, computer and robotic control, electric current or magnetic fields,” according to the Active Disassembly website.

Plastics for a Circular Economy

Plastic poses one of the biggest challenges to the circular economy. It is ubiquitous, made from petroleum and takes hundreds of years to decompose. According to a 2016 report by the World Economic Forum, “The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics,” plastic packaging is of particular concern. “After a short first-use cycle, 95% of plastic packaging material value, or $80 billion to $120 billion annually, is lost to the economy. A staggering 32% of plastic packaging escapes collection systems, generating significant economic costs.” In fact, says the report, “The cost of such after-use externalities for plastic packaging, plus the cost associated with greenhouse gas emissions from its production, is conservatively estimated at $40 billion annually — exceeding the plastic packaging industry’s total profits.”

One of the reasons plastic recycling rates are so low is because two or more incompatible types of material are often combined together to achieve the qualities needed for specific packages. According to Jeff Wooster, global sustainability director at Dow, the plastic pouches used for everything from frozen food to laundry detergent pods, offer a good example.

They are traditionally made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), laminated to a film made of polyethylene. Using these two different plastics gives the pouches both “a nice glossy look, and stiffness that lets it stand up on the shelf,” says Wooster, and “the ability to run at high speeds on packaging machines.” It also makes the pouches impossible to recycle.

To solve this problem, Dow scientists came up with a new packaging structure that meets all the product design specifications but is made not of PET but of two types of polyethylene instead. “By combining different types of polyethylene that are compatible with each other,” explains Wooster, Dow created a stand-up pouch that can be recycled in supermarket bins along with plastic shopping bags. One of the first applications of the innovative material was as the pouch for Seventh Generation dishwasher pods. The primary uses for the recycled polyethylene are new shopping bags, which retain much of the product’s original value, and wood-plastic composite lumber, which effectively puts the plastic back to good use for at least 50 years.

The stand-up pouch is far from Dow’s only contribution to the circular economy. Another innovation announced in the fall of 2016 is a product made of polypropylene-based olefin block copolymers. In the past, post-consumer streams that included polypropylene and polyethylene were difficult to recycle. Dow’s innovation makes it possible to combine these two commonly used resins into a host of products — including rigid containers and drums, household containers, industrial tanks, kayaks, and flexible packaging — all of which “offer upcycling opportunities for recyclers and brand owners,” according to the company.

Products That Track Themselves

A surprisingly simple idea is driving still more innovation that supports the circular economy: keeping track of what you own. Digital technology, including the “internet of things,” is making it possible for companies to design “intelligent assets” that can report back their location, availability and condition. The ability to channel, accumulate, and process this information as “big data” is enabling companies to maximize the value of these assets over time.

Caterpillar, for instance, is using on-board sensors that monitor its equipment in the field, combined with predictive diagnostics, to extend the life of its products. The technology allows the company to move from repair-after-failure to repair-before-failure and to improve maintenance based on how a machine is being used — all of which saves customers downtime and expense.

IBM has used similar technology to develop a comprehensive analytics asset called the Reuse Selection Tool, to help product managers choose the next optimal use for a product. Now in prototype, the tool ingests a vast range of granular data — including information about the equipment’s modularity and reuse potential, regulations, market price, cost of remanufacturing, and supply and demand — enabling the product manager to decide on a per-unit basis whether to remanufacture, recycle, or scrap. It is also exploring the possibility of using cognitive computing, pioneered by the Watson system, to help interpret the data.

A new business-to-business sharing platform, FLOOW2, takes a simpler approach. Instead of relying on intelligent assets that keep track of themselves, it has created a Craigslist-type marketplace where companies can advertise equipment, facilities, and make them available for rent rather than purchase. Such collaborative consumption is already powering the sharing economy at the consumer level. FLOOW2’s innovation is to extend the idea to the business world.

Designing Products that Use CO²

One of the primary goals of the circular economy is to prevent the average global temperature from rising 2°C above preindustrial levels. According to the International Energy Agency, achieving this goal will require an investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency of $1 trillion a year for the next 34 years, a three-fold increase in the current level of investment. “It’s not happening,” says Bernard David, senior fellow at IGEL and chairman of CO² Sciences, Inc. Even with all the activities on the horizon, the amount of carbon dioxide staying in the atmosphere will mean an unacceptable increase in global warming.

One potential solution to this problem is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), which buries the greenhouse gas underground. But the strategy is not yet technically feasible. “Most current CCS techniques are uneconomic because they consume too much energy to sequester the carbon, so they have yet to be deployed at scale,” reports a recent GreenBiz article, “Seven Companies to Watch in Carbon Capture and Storage.”

The Global CO² Initiative, also a brainchild of Bernard David, takes a different approach. Instead of simply burying the gas as a destructive waste product, the initiative aims to transform the global economy through new inventions and investments to use as much as 10% of global CO² to make useful, profitable products at scale. A market assessment by McKinsey & Co. identified 25 potential products, representing a market that could reach $1 trillion by 2030. Each of these products is at a different level of readiness, which the initiative grades on a nine-point scale. “In order to have a meaningful impact,” says David, “you have to get all these things to a level 9.”

Cement is the lowest hanging fruit. One process, already in use, promises to reduce the industry’s CO² emissions by 70%, both by capturing the gas in the cement and by dramatically reducing emissions during curing. Since cement manufacturing accounts for 7% of CO², David says, “Potentially, with that one industry, we can reduce CO² emissions by 5% annually.”

The initiative, which was launched in January 2016, is working to build “a whole ecosystem to create at scale CO²-based products,” David explains. It’s a monumental task, but in October 2017, less than a year after it began, the initiative released a draft “Roadmap of the Global Commercialization Potential of Carbon Capture and Utilization Technologies through 2030.” A full roadmap was released in Marrakesh, Morocco, in November 2016 at the Conference of Parties meeting held to advance the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

As the initiative roadmap suggests, the way forward is paved with possibilities. There will undoubtedly be potholes and detours as companies rethink product design with circularity in mind. But thanks to the design strategies mentioned above, and others not yet imagined, the journey towards a circular economy is off to a strong start. ∞

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One Comment So Far

Anumakonda Jagadeesh

Excellent.
A circular economy is a regenerative system in which resource input and waste, emission, and energy leakage are minimised by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy loops. This can be achieved through long-lasting design, maintenance, repair, reuse, remanufacturing, refurbishing, and recycling.
The circular economy concept has deep-rooted origins and cannot be traced back to one single date or author. Its practical applications to modern economic systems and industrial processes, however, have gained momentum since the late 1970s, led by a small number of academics, thought-leaders and businesses.
Cradle to Cradle
German chemist and visionary Michael Braungart went on to develop, together with American architect Bill McDonough, the Cradle to Cradle™ concept and certification process. This design philosophy considers all material involved in industrial and commercial processes to be nutrients, of which there are two main categories: technical and biological. The Cradle to Cradle framework focuses on design for effectiveness in terms of products with positive impact and reducing the negative impacts of commerce through efficiency.
Cradle to Cradle design perceives the safe and productive processes of nature’s ‘biological metabolism’ as a model for developing a ‘technical metabolism’ flow of industrial materials. Product components can be designed for continuous recovery and reutilisation as biological and technical nutrients within these metabolisms.
• Eliminate the concept of waste. “Waste equals food.” Design products and materials with life cycles that are safe for human health and the environment and that can be reused perpetually through biological and technical metabolisms. Create and participate in systems to collect and recover the value of these materials following their use.
• Power with renewable energy. “Use current solar income.” Maximize the use of renewable energy.
• Respect human & natural systems. “Celebrate diversity.” Manage water use to maximize quality, promote healthy ecosystems and respect local impacts. Guide operations and stakeholder relationships using social responsibility.
Biomimicry
Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, defines her approach as ‘a new discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems’. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example. She thinks of it as ‘innovation inspired by nature’. Biomimicry relies on three key principles:
• Nature as model: Study nature’s models and emulate these forms, process, systems, and strategies to solve human problems.
• Nature as measure: Use an ecological standard to judge the sustainability of our innovations.
• Nature as mentor: View and value nature not based on what we can extract from the natural world, but what we can learn from it.
In the video below, Janine Benyus explains the concept and highlights examples of biomimetic innovation(ELLEN MACARTHUR FOUNDATION).
The term encompasses more than the production and consumption of goods and services, including a shift from fossil fuels to the use of renewable energy, and the role of diversity as a characteristic of resilient and productive systems. It includes discussion of the role of money and finance as part of the wider debate, and some of its pioneers have called for a revamp of economic performance measurement tools.[3]
Linear “take, make, dispose” industrial processes and the lifestyles that feed on them deplete finite reserves to create products that end up in landfills or in incinerators.
This realisation triggered the thought process of a few scientists and thinkers, including Walter R. Stahel, an architect, economist, and a founding father of industrial sustainability. Credited with having coined the expression “Cradle to Cradle” (in contrast with “Cradle to Grave”, illustrating our “Resource to Waste” way of functioning), in the late 1970s, Stahel worked on developing a “closed loop” approach to production processes, co-founding the Product-Life Institute in Geneva more than 25 years ago. In the UK, Steve D. Parker researched waste as a resource in the UK agricultural sector in 1982, developing novel closed loop production systems mimicking, and integrated with, the symbiotic biological ecosystems they exploited.
Key Elements
With a surge in popularity, many circular principles are available, varying widely depending on the problems being addressed, the audience, or the lens through which the author views the world. There are at least the following key elements to be identified within a circular economy.
Ensure renewable, reusable, non-toxic resources are utilised as materials and energy in an efficient way. Ultimately the system should aim to run on ‘current sunshine’ and generate energy through renewable sources. An example of this principle is The Biosphere Rules framework for closed-loop production which identifies Power Autonomy as one of nature’s principles for sustainable manufacturing. It requires that energy efficiency be first maximized so that renewable energy becomes economical. It also requires that materials need to be non-toxic to be able to recirculate without causing harm to the living environment.
The second element aims to utilise waste streams as a source of secondary resources and recover waste for reuse and recycling and is grounded on the idea that waste does not exist. It is necessary here to design out waste, meaning that both the biological and technical components (nutrients) of a product are designed intentionally in such a way that waste streams are minimalized.
Account for the systems perspective during the design process, to use the right materials, to design for appropriate lifetime and to design for extended future use. Meaning that a product is designed to fit within a materials cycle, can easily be dissembled and can easily be used with a different purpose. Hereby one could consider strategies like emotionally durable design. It should be stressed that there is not something like one ideal blueprint for future design. Modularity, versatility and adaptiveness are to be prioritised in an uncertain and fast evolving world, meaning that diverse products, materials, and systems, with many connections and scales are more resilient in the face of external shocks, than monotone systems built simply for efficiency.
While resources are in-use, maintain, repair and upgrade them to maximise their lifetime and give them a second life through take back strategies when applicable. This could mean that a product is accompanied with a pre-thought maintenance programme to maximise its lifetime, including a buyback program and supporting logistics system. Second hand sales or refurbish programs also falls within this element.
Within a circular economy, one should work together throughout the supply chain, internally within organisations and with the public sector to increase transparency and create joint value. For the business sector this calls for collaboration within the supply chain and cross-sectoral, recognising the interdependence between the different market players. Governments can support this by creating the right incentives, for example via common standards within a regulatory framework and provide business support.
Track and optimise resource use and strengthen connections between supply chain actors through digital, online platforms and technologies that provide insights. It also encompasses virtualized value creation and delivering, for example via 3D printers, and communicating with customers virtually.
In a circular economy, prices act as messages, and therefore need to reflect full costs in order to be effective.[13] The full costs of negative externalities are revealed and taken into account, and perverse subsidies are removed. A lack of transparency on externalities acts as a barrier to the transition to a circular economy.
The circular economy is a framework that draws upon and encompasses principles from:[14]
Systems thinking
The ability to understand how things influence one another within a whole. Elements are considered as ‘fitting in’ their infrastructure, environment and social context. Whilst a machine is also a system, systems thinking usually refers to nonlinear systems: systems where through feedback and imprecise starting conditions the outcome is not necessarily proportional to the input and where evolution of the system is possible: the system can display emergent properties. Examples of these systems are all living systems and any open system such as meteorological systems or ocean currents, even the orbits of the planets have nonlinear characteristics.
Understanding a system is crucial when trying to decide and plan (corrections) in a system. Missing or misinterpreting the trends, flows, functions of, and human influences on, our socio-ecological systems can result in disastrous results. In order to prevent errors in planning or design an understanding of the system should be applied to the whole and to the details of the plan or design. The Natural Step created a set of systems conditions (or sustainability principles) that can be applied when designing for (parts of) a circular economy to ensure alignment with functions of the socio-ecological system.
The concept of the circular economy has previously been expressed as the circulation of money versus goods, services, access rights, valuable documents, etc., in macroeconomics. This situation has been illustrated in many diagrams for money and goods circulation associated with social systems. As a system, various agencies or entities are connected by paths through which the various goods etc., pass in exchange for money. However, this situation is different from the circular economy described above, where the flow is unilinear – in only one direction, that is, until the recycled goods again are spread over the world.(Wikipedia).
Prognosis
Over time, one approach to sustainable development has gained traction among economists, policymakers and business people, and has also caught Global Organisation’s attention. It’s called the circular economy. Although there are many conceptions of the circular economy, they all describe a new way of creating value, and ultimately prosperity, through extending product lifespan and relocating waste from the end of the supply chain to the beginning – in effect, using resources more efficiently by using them more than once.
By and large, today’s manufacturing takes raw materials from the environment and turns them into new products, which are then discarded into the environment.
It’s a linear process with a beginning and an end. In this system, limited raw materials eventually run out. Waste accumulates, either incurring expenses related to disposal or else pollution. Additionally, manufacturing processes are often themselves inefficient, leading to further waste of natural resources.
In a circular economy, however, materials for new products come from old products. As much as possible, everything is reused, re-manufactured or, as a last resort, recycled back into a raw material or used as a source of energy.
Governments are encouraging – and, in some cases, requiring – the adoption of circular economy principles that would lead to higher resource efficiency and less waste. At the global level, the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the United Nations Member States in 2015, include many related ambitions.
There are nearly 200 million smart phone users in the U.S. alone. Smart phones are highly sophisticated products containing a multitude of chemical elements and metals. But the average lifetime of a smartphone is going down all the time as the speed of technological development charges on. What if a smartphone were designed in a modular way where components could easily be assembled and disassembled? What if the design was open source? A customer could now buy and use the phone’s core (frame, screen and casing) over 10 years instead of two, while frequently upgrading its functionality (e.g. camera, memory and processor) according to personal desires. What about unwanted components? They could be traded on an online platform to other customers desiring them.
At end-of-life the phone would be easy to disassemble and recycle for valuable metals and minerals. You now have a circular business and consumer ecosystem with a range of business models around selling the core and components, facilitating hardware marketplaces, refurbishing, reclaiming and recycling. Over the lifecycle of the phone itself, revenue generation will increase multiple times with little or no growth in resource use. This is just one of the transformative potentials of circular models to economic growth(Fortune).
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP)